The Simplest Words

by Alex Miller

  As a child of nine in the assembly hall at school, watching in rigid silence while the unspeakable horrors unfolded on the screen, I saw how we humans were all touched by these evils in ways that ought to prevent us from speaking of them and us. Surely it was all us. All humanity. The great European civilisation and its astonishing self-assurance of superiority in the face of Indigenous cultures had been the author of the greatest evil of all time. And here were Frank Budby and his people not only recovering from that predatory civilisation but reaching out to it and teaching it something of profound significance, offering a gift from the Indigenous sensibility. It is the Aboriginal leader in Landscape of Farewell who gives to the European professor of history the hope of redemption from what has been the professor’s crushing and intractable sense of guilt by association for the evils of his father’s generation. The contemporary human, the private moral dimensions, of this situation clamoured to be explored. I was eager to contextualise historically the actions of the Aboriginal leader of the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre, Gnapun the warrior, whose strategic intelligence and leadership had resulted in the annihilation of the strongest and most well-armed party of colonists ever to settle in the Central Highlands of Queensland. Gnapun’s was a raid that resulted in no black casualties that day. His leadership and organisation were exemplary. He had never been credited. White retribution followed the massacre and continues to this day to echo in our silence, in our failure to celebrate Gnapun’s heroic, indeed his Homeric, leadership.

  My ninth novel, Lovesong, has its seed not only in my visit to Tunisia in search of Conditions of Faith in 1998, but also, and more deeply, in my wife’s powerful desire for a second child, a child she always knew with uncanny certainty was to be a girl. In Stephanie’s need, in her certainty, I saw a new level of the mystery of the impulse to motherhood and I set out to explore it. At least I think that is what I did. It may well be that I am still too close to this book to know yet what it was really about.

  Autumn Laing, the tenth novel, has its origins in the same period of my life as my first, The Tivington Nott. My association with Sidney Nolan’s work began when I was a boy working on Exmoor. An Australian came to live near the farm and he and I became friends; he is memorialised as the stranger who owns the black entire Kabara in The Tivington Nott. We talked of what we hoped for from life. I told him I dreamed of going to the frontiers of civilisation. He gave me a book illustrated with hauntingly suggestive black-and-white photographs of the Australian outback. The photographs enthralled me and I longed to go and find the Australian outback for myself. Many years later, in 1961, the year before I went to Melbourne University, I bought the first monograph to be published on Nolan and sent it to my father as a Christmas present. In the first few pages of The Ancestor Game I refer to the gift of this book and how I came to get it back without it having ever been opened. My father was a lover of the faded watercolour landscapes of Cotman and Crome and viewed my gift of Nolan’s bleak modernism as a provocation.

  After the English edition of The Tivington Nott was imported into Australia (I had failed to find an Australian publisher for the book), I received a letter from an old friend of Sidney Nolan’s, the poet Barrett Reid, who was then living at Heide, the house which had stood at the centre of Australia’s modernist art movement and where Nolan had found his muse and his sustenance for the practice of his art in the person of Sunday Reed, a woman deeply loved and respected by Barrett. Barrie’s letter praised The Tivington Nott and asked me who I was and why no one in Melbourne had heard of me. When he and Paul Carter awarded The Tivington Nott the Braille Book of the Year Award in 1990 (five years after I had written it), the three of us met and became friends. Sid Nolan, his art and life, and the life of Heide, when John and Sunday Reed made it the centre of our new art, were often the subject of conversation with Barrie. Barrie pointed out to me that it was most likely that the book given to me by the Australian on Exmoor had been illustrated by Nolan’s photographs of the outback. For me, as you can imagine, this was a magical connection. Autumn Laing fulfils a lifelong preoccupation with Sidney Nolan and his life and work.

  The idea for Autumn Laing in its present form came to me in London. Autumn Laing (the woman) sprang into my head fully formed. She sprang, however, not from nowhere, but from the springboard of my previous work on this book and from my decades-long preoccupation with certain tides in the life of Sidney Nolan, tides towards which I had always felt a deep sympathy and curiosity. I recognised in Autumn’s voice a prompt of my imagination. It was a precious gift from my unconscious, the writer’s source. It was in her voice (within her mask) that I wrote the book. It felt right for me to do so. My wife has since pointed out to me that this book is as much about a certain period in my own life as it is about either Nolan or his muse.

  In writing my novels I have learned that the writer is not master of the story but that the story is master of the writer. I have learned that it is the writer who serves the story, not the other way around. As early as my failed original plan for The Tivington Nott I learned that fiction won’t be squeezed and warped into self-conscious symmetries of organisation without losing its spirit. Fiction, I believe, obeys deeper and more hidden laws than plotted narratives. Despite the contemporary desire to exchange the word story for narrative, mere narrative is not story. Story obeys mysterious laws embedded in the human unconscious and is made available to us only through the prompts of our imagination. To trust these prompts is not as straightforward as it might seem. The novel as a form of storytelling may die, but we will always find ways of telling our stories. No one speaks of the death of story.

  As I said, I don’t like writing directly about myself. Truth evades us by means not perceived by us. Truth is not a given but requires a continuous effort to be won. We are fools if we think we are masters of the truth (as I once foolishly assumed I was master of the story). We stumble towards our truths and our stories with uncertainty. Finding truth is like understanding ourselves. It is a view through the window of a moving train. Next time we look the landscape has changed. It is never finished. Never done with. Never completed. Death finishes it. Truth, like understanding, changes with our days. The impulse towards it, however, I believe remains constant in us. Our desire for it. Our desire to be true. The urge we have to touch it and to claim it for ourselves. To know in our hearts that we have not fooled ourselves but have truly understood.

  It is I, not my readers, who must be beguiled by the mask for it to be an effective means of achieving detachment from the mirror image of self. The mask, as both metaphor and reality, was well known by the classical dramatists to reveal more than it conceals. No matter how artful the mask, the goal of all storytelling is, finally, to account for one’s own story. To the interviewer’s question, ‘Is it autobiographical?’ the honest answer must be, ‘Inevitably.’ Writing is a joy. When I’m not writing I feel unplugged. Powerless. Disconnected from myself. When I am writing I enjoy a mysterious illusion of invincibility and connectedness. Life without writing is not only no fun for me, it is also life without meaning.

  2012

  EXCERPT FROM

  Conditions of Faith

  She did not resist but let him lead her deep into the vault until they reached a small open space at the far end of the racks. A pile of loose wheaten straw and a pitchfork rested against the wall. It was a kind of encampment. There was a three-legged stool and a small haversack. A priest’s square biretta rested on the haversack. Beside it was a black stove. The window of the stove glowed red and there was a smell of kerosene. A smoky hurricane lantern hung from an iron hook in the wall, shedding a poor light over the scene.

  They stood together in this small open space, their hands clasped, their shoulders touching lightly. She could hear his breathing. He reached and felt about in the straw on the rack in front of them and drew out a large pink-and-yellow peach.

  ‘You must close your eyes,’ he told her, and he held the peach behind his back.

  ‘
Why?’

  ‘It’s the rule. Just close your eyes. It won’t work if your eyes are open. Close them!’ he insisted.

  She closed her eyes.

  He held the peach under her nose. As she breathed, he breathed. ‘There!’ he said, exhaling his breath and gazing at her.

  She opened her eyes. ‘I saw an orchard in the sunlight.’

  They looked at each other.

  She swallowed nervously and would have taken her hand from his but he tightened his grip. He touched the peach to her other hand. ‘It’s for you. It is yours.’

  She accepted the peach from him. Something gracious and solemn in the exchange surprising them, impressing them, and rendering them mute. In the surrounding darkness, the deeper shadows of his eyes, the sharp gleam of reflected light within his pupils.

  He asked softly, ‘Do you know how we ripen the fruit as it is needed?’

  ‘How?’ she asked, the firm globe of the fragrant peach enclosed in the palm of her hand between them. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘To ripen, their skins must touch. We lay each piece of fruit on the straw singly or they would all ripen together.’ He reached into the straw on the rack and removed another peach and he took the peach from her hand and set the two peaches together, their rosy skins touching. ‘Now they will ripen each other.’

  ‘Is this really true?’ she asked, a little breathless, a little childlike, gazing at the two peaches as if she expected them to ripen magically before her eyes.

  ‘It’s true. Fruit kept singly for too long rots before it ripens.’

  ‘I must get back,’ she said, but she did not withdraw her hand from his.

  ‘Who is waiting for you?’ He looked into her eyes.

  She hesitated. ‘I’m with a party of tourists. They must think by now that I’m lost. They’ll be looking for me.’

  ‘But you are lost. You said, I lost my way.’ He waited. ‘You came here as if you knew the lamp had been lit for you.’

  She withdrew her hand from his. ‘I must get back to my group.’ Her voice was unsteady.

  ‘You’re not with a group,’ he said, a touch of fierceness in his voice.

  ‘Yes, I am.’ His smell was close and warm in the chill air.

  ‘You’re alone. I can tell.’

  ‘I came with a party of Germans. That’s the truth,’ she whispered helplessly.

  ‘You came in search of something. You persisted until you reached this place. You must have climbed the barrier. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I know!’

  ‘It’s no good,’ she said hopelessly. ‘I must get back!’ He was looking up into her face, his neck thick and powerfully muscled. She reached and with the tips of her fingers she touched the vein in his neck and felt his heartbeat surge beneath her fingers.

  2000

  The Inspiration Behind Lovesong

  My daughter was visiting us in the country. We were sitting by the fire reading. I was reading Edward Said’s Musical Elaborations, the series of three lectures on a musical theme that Said had given at the University of California in 1989. I was close to the end of the third and last lecture, ‘Melody, Solitude, and Affirmation’, when I read the following: ‘And that memory led me back to Louis Malle’s film Les Amants, constructed around the relatively innocuous tale of a nameless unknown man happening on a lonely wife (Jeanne Moreau) in the country, and then becoming her lover for a time before he moves on.’ When I read this I put the book aside and said to my daughter, ‘I think I’ll write a simple love story.’ My daughter, who was eighteen at the time, answered at once, ‘Love’s not simple, Dad. You should know that.’ The young are wise. I did know it. Love, or at least sensual love, is surely the most complicated and hazardous of our states of mind.

  What I imagined, when I laid Said’s little book aside and looked into the flames of the fire, was a man driving along the old gravel road to Lower Araluen, where I once had a farm. The man, who was in a sense the nameless unknown man of Said’s memory of the Louis Malle film, and in another sense was of course myself, was returning to the farm which had once been my own. He was returning after an absence of many years. He was coming back out of curiosity, just to see the old place again. When he came to the farm, the old house below the road and just above the creek flat, he pulled up and sat looking down at the place that had once been his home. A woman was working in a well-tended vegetable garden at the back of the house. He sat watching her for a while, then decided he would go down and make himself known to her.

  Before sending the nameless unknown stranger down to the nameless unknown woman in the garden, I began to wonder where the man was returning from. As the author of this love story, I believed I should know. Who was this man? He could not be me. But perhaps he could continue to have something of my background. During the seventies I had lived for a year in Paris. So why couldn’t he be an Australian who had gone overseas and, instead of living in London, had lived in Paris? What, I asked myself, might have kept this man in Paris for so long? Was it love? Was he returning to his old home after the breakup of a marriage?

  I sold my farm in the Araluen Valley when I went to live in Paris, invited to go by a woman friend who, when she visited me at Araluen, had seen how jaded I was by my lonely life on the farm. After I’d been living in Paris for a year, I decided I liked it so much I would come home to Australia, sell my house in Melbourne and move back to Paris permanently. When I got home, however, I met a young woman and we fell in love, and instead of selling my house I lived in it with the young woman, who soon became my wife and, eventually, the mother of our children. In a sense I gave John Patterner the reverse of my own story. His story is why he stayed, and the life he lived there with his wife, when, like me, he had not intended to stay.

  I used to visit a cafe in Paris called Chez Max. I visited it regularly. It was my place for coffee and to eat my evening meal. It was run by a North African, a Pied-Noir, and many of his clients were North Africans, but it was not exclusively North African and always had a good mixture of people. I liked the easygoing atmosphere and the padron made me welcome. Also the other clients were not French and spoke French little better than I did. We got along. We were outsiders in Paris. Chez Max, of course, became, with a little twist here and there, the model for Chez Dom in this story—the book that became my complicated love story, as my daughter had predicted.

  I had visited Tunisia some years before while researching my novel Conditions of Faith and had made Tunisian friends. The country and its people have stayed with me and have become part of the vocabulary of my imagination. Tunisia and its people fit easily for me into the Paris I know. When I think of my Paris days I think also of my days in El Djem and Sidi Bou Said and the people I knew there. Perhaps one day I shall return to the farm at Lower Araluen and let the unknown and unnamed strangers meet at last. But that’s another story!

  2009

  EXCERPT FROM

  Lovesong

  As I stood there enjoying the pastry smells and the friendliness of the place, I felt as if I’d stepped into a generous little haven of old-fashioned goodwill. This, I decided, was due to the family that was running the shop, something to do with the sane modesty of their contentment, but more than anything it was due to the manner and style of the woman.

  When my turn came to be served I asked her for half a dozen sesame biscuits. I watched her select the biscuits with the crocodile tongs. Separately and without hurry, she placed each biscuit in the paper bag in her other hand, her grave manner implying that this simple act of serving me deserved all her care. She was in her early forties, perhaps forty-three or -four. She was dark and very beautiful, North African probably. But what impressed me even more than her physical beauty was her self-possession. I was reminded of the refined courtesy once regularly encountered among the Spanish, particularly among the Madrilenos, a reserved respect that speaks of a belief in the dignity of humanity; a quality rarely encountered in Madrid these days, and then only among t
he elderly. It was this woman’s fine sense of courtesy to which the customers in her shop were responding. When she handed me the bag of sesame biscuits I thanked her and she smiled. Before she turned away I saw a sadness in the depths of her dark brown eyes, a hint of some ancient buried sorrow there. And on my way home I began to wonder about her story.

  2009

  How I Came to Write Autumn Laing

  My first encounter with the work of Sidney Nolan was when I was a boy of fifteen and was working as a labourer on an Exmoor farm. An Australian gave me a book on the outback. The book was illustrated with black-and-white photographs of a vast silent land that was mysterious to me and which compelled my imagination. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the haunting photographs in the book were the work of the Australian artist Sidney Nolan. I came to Australia on my own at the age of sixteen in search of Sidney Nolan’s outback. It was the most important decision I have ever made. I still revisit Central and North Queensland and have many friends there. That strange and beautiful country photographed with the imagination of Nolan has been a deep and lasting influence on my life as a writer.

  My second encounter with the work of Nolan was in 1961, when Thames and Hudson published the first major monograph on the Australian artist’s work. Though I had very little money at the time—I was earning a living in Melbourne cleaning cars while studying at night for my university entrance exams—I thought this expensive book so important that I bought a copy and sent it to my father as a Christmas present. Nolan’s art, it seemed to me, would reveal to my father more about Australia than my letters ever could. It was through my father’s encouragement that I had first developed what proved to be a lifelong interest in art. He wanted me to be an artist. I did the next best thing and became a writer.